Bret Fausett has joined Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) as Chief Legal Officer and VP, Regulatory Affairs. Fausett left his General Counsel role at Uniregistry in July after nearly six years at the company. Prior to that, he was in private practice.

Statton Hammock is now Vice-President, Global Policy and Industry Development at MarkMonitor, a Clarivate Analytics company. Hammock left Rightside in August subsequent to the company’s acquisition by Donuts. He had been at the company for five years and has prior experience at Network Solutions.

I often claim that Domain Name Wire was the first blog-style site covering the business of domain names. I add “business” as a qualifier because I know I can’t claim to be the first to blog about domain names.

Lawyer Bret Fausett started blogging at Lextext.com back in 2000. His goal was to publicize information about ICANN that wasn’t getting much press. He told ICANN they should try to put his blog out of business, and he thinks they’ve done a good job at that by improving external communications.

Fausett is an attorney with Adorno & Yoss in Los Angeles. I sat down with him in his office Wednesday morning.

I asked Fausett about several domain name issues, including the Kentucky domain seizure and UDRPs.

The Kentucky decision should be released on Thursday. Fausett is fairly sure the judge will not proceed with the seizure of the domain names. “There are so many things wrong with this case that I don’t know where to start,” he said. For example, the statute the Kentucky governor has applied about seizing gambling devices doesn’t apply to domain names and was written well before domain names existed.

Fausett also explained the actions GoDaddy took by handing over “registrar certificates” for its clients’ domain names in the case. Registrar certificates are defined in the anti-cybersquatting act. Essentially by handing them over the registrar is immune from legal action in a cybersquatting case. But as Fausett points out, this isn’t a cybersquatting case.

As for UDRPs, Fausett is disturbed by the inconsistency of decisions. He represents respondents 90% of the time. He cites differences in trademark law amongst countries as part of the difficulty: panelists bring different biases about trademarks depending on the law in their country.

So is Fausett a domainer, too? He says he dabbled in domaining a couple years ago and picked up about 250 names, many of which he’s let expire. He did it because he likes “learning by doing” and wanted to understand more about what domainers were doing.

Lawyers aren’t known for swag, but I got an official Bret Fausett bobblehead (see picture). Bret, if you’re reading, your left arm with the briefcase was broken when I took it out of the box. I opened the briefcase and it was full of unpaid parking tickets 🙂